Reacting is one thing, overreacting is another. Even if you believe the "device" looked like a bomb (which it most certainly didn't if the posted pictures are accurate), it should have been easy enough for them to have her walk through one of the explosives sniffers, or be sniffed by a bomb dog. If she was clean, they could have let her go, apologized for wasting her time, and let her go. But arresting her and charging her with some bullshit? That's fucking stupid.
People should be smart enough to know not to go wandering around with that kinda stuff like that.
No, people should be free enought to go walking around with "that kinda stuff" without being arrested for it by some fucking idiot cop with an IQ approximately equal to his shoe size
She caused an incident that could have been avoided by leaving that crap at home.
She didn't cause a damn thing. The "incident" was caused by the incompetent security personnel at the airport. They have explosives sniffing machines or dogs at the airport, no? If so, it would have taken 5 minutes to check her to make sure she wasn't carrying any explosives, after which she should have been sent on her way with a hearty apology for wasting her time.
Anyone with half a brain should know that walking around with bombish looking stuff in an airport is gonna cause problems.
Nothing she was carrying looked a damn thing like a bomb to anybody except a total moron.
I hate to break it to you, but the US government has sovereignty over its citizens and that means it can do whatever it wants (up to an including killing them) without a "howdy hay" from anyone.
Only if they allow it. The "howdy hay" can certainly come from the individual, and many individuals will give a "howdy hay" at attempts by the US government (or any other) to assert their "sovereignty."
Sovereignty exists in the hands of the individual until the individual gives up that right to a government and that's exactly what the people of Colonial America did in 1783. They voluntarily gave up the rights of their individual government to the will of the federal government (or state -- see "clipped sovereignty" for me info.).
They may have given away their own, but they didn't give away mine, or yours, or kdawson's or that of anybody else alive today.
Really? Because, when I watched the video, what I saw was him fighting as hard as he could to get out of their grasp and get back to the mic,
Obviously you watched a different video than I did then. What I saw was him try to jerk away from the cops in the direction of the microphone once, about 10-15 seconds into the video. And you can certainly argue that the cops had no business initiating force on him by physically grabbing him in the first place, which is what really set this all off. There is no reason why police should not be expected to utilize diplomacy and tact in dealing with people who are "in the wrong" in a vague sense, but are not posing a threat to anyone. If they had just gathered around him, and explained nicely "hey, the organizers say you're being disruptive, we'd like to ask you to leave" this whole situation probably could have been avoided. Never mind the fact that Kerry starts trying to answer his question, which implies that at that point in time "the organizers" are actually OK with him and his question.
which is what triggered flooring and cuffing him.
No, by the time he was thrown down on the floor and cuffed they already had him up at the top of the steps and not too far from the exit. All they had to do was continue moving him outside and it would have been a done deal. There was NEVER any valid reason for the takedown, the cuffing, or the tazer.
And even then, held down by four cops and cuffed, he was still struggling, to the point that he was able to turn his body 90 degrees and lift his torso and head to say "don't tazer me, bro".
Good, once they took him down they had clearly gone overboard and he *should* have resisted, with every ounce of strength in his body. If he'd fucked up one or more of the cops at that point, it would have been justified as self-defense.
So what? Those aren't crimes in and of themselves.
The shocking was used to make him stop moving so they could cuff him.
They had no valid reason to cuff him in the first place. Even if you accept that they had a valid reason to physically remove him from the venue, they were doing a pretty good job of herding him towards the door before throwing him to the ground and tasering him. All they had to do was keep doing what they were doing, move him outside, and then not let him back inside. No arrest was necessary or warranted, and no tasering was necessary.
All of that was his choice. The police did nothing but react to him. Just deal with it.
He was - from what I saw - moving along with the herd of cops, towards the door. Once that was the case, no further escalation by the cops was necessary unless he had begun to strike at them, or brandish a weapon, etc.
Once they threw him on the ground, they were well into "excessive use of force" and he would have been justified (and anybody intervening on his behalf would have been equally justified) to defend himself by any means necessary.
One remarkable thing with laws in most of the US is that the one piece of the English common law that didn't survive here is the right to resist an unlawful arrest. Seems kind of perverse when you think about it - you can be arrested for no reason and have to just go with it until they decide to release you.
That is exactly why more people need to understand that "the law" or "the constitution", etc., do not define your rights. Your rights are your rights, period, end of story, full-stop. If you are guilty of no crime, the police have NO authority to arrest you, detain you, or otherwise fuck with you unless YOU grant it too them. Now here's the rub: most people are willing to grant the police that (temporary) authority if they believe they are innocent, because they believe they can get a lawyer, have their day in court, and be acquitted. And 9 times out of 10, that may be the best approach. But it's still a must to remember that the police have no intrinisic authority whatsoever, and if they violate your rights, you have every right to resist in any and every way possible.
No, asking the kid to step down from the microphone when he went over his time is fine, and I can't see anybody having a problem with that. But it was what happened afterwards that's the problem. They were doing a fine job of moving him out of the area, and there was no need whatsoever to throw him down on the ground, and even less need to taser him. He was outnumbered as it was, and did not appear to be armed with any sort of weapon.
What happened was a travesty and anybody who sat back and watched that shit happen without lifting a finger to help should be ashamed of themselves.
Good for him. He hadn't done anything criminal, and he *should* resist arrest.
and should have complied with the officers.
Bullshit. A cop is just another punk-ass bitch with a little tin badge, a gun, and a taser. They aren't special, and if they're infringing your rights, you should resist them with every means available to you.
regardless of whether the police were doing the right thing, the crowd should have tried to save the guy.. this is frighteningly close to people being too afraid to do anything when their neighbors are dragged away by the gestapo, and the threat is clear in the video "stay in your seats or you'll be tasered and arrested too."
What has happened to the back-bone of the American people? Look, if that shit, or the similar incident at UCLA, had gone down in the 1960's, you can get some cops would have gotten beat the fuck down.
Now, people just sit in their chairs, mind their business, and maybe - if they're really radical - film the incident so they can put it up on youtube. But where are the people willing to come to the aid of these people who are being abused by cops? Where the the American people with the balls / back-bone to physically intervene when someone is being punished for no reason?
How can people just sit back and watch this shit happen? When did our nation become nothing but passive sheep who blindly follow instructions and obey "the man" just because he's "the man?" This is pathetic, just pathetic.
When various of your joints are locked to the verge of damage, you are going to cooperate. Haven't you ever watched UFC?
There almost certainly is not a single high-level (or maybe even low-level) UFC level fighter whose base style is aikido. Aikido *might* be an effective style *if* they trained full-speed against resisting opponents like brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioners or wrestlers, but as it's commonly taught and trained, aikido is almost useless. Some of the "come along" holds are used by cops and bouncers to move drunks around, but that's about it.
The guy is a journalism student. He knew that his actions were going to get publicity. He knew what was going to happen if he acted out. Really, what was his motive???
What does that matter? It was excessive force, regardless of what his motive was.
Providing a legitimate link to source is just as good. Otherwise, they could be in for chewing up valuable bandwidth and transfer charges.
It's not "just as good" to provide a link to a site you don't control or have some sort of agreement in place with. From the GPL FAQ:
The GPL says you must offer access to copy the source code "from the same place"; that is, next to the binaries. However, if you make arrangements with another site to keep the necessary source code available, and put a link or cross-reference to the source code next to the binaries, we think that qualifies as "from the same place".
Note, however, that it is not enough to find some site that happens to have the appropriate source code today, and tell people to look there. Tomorrow that site may have deleted that source code, or simply replaced it with a newer version of the same program. Then you would no longer be complying with the GPL requirements. To make a reasonable effort to comply, you need to make a positive arrangement with the other site, and thus ensure that the source will be available there for as long as you keep the binaries available.
Yeah, think about this: how can you prove the envelope was sealed, and contained it's present contents, when you mailed it? If this worked, you could just mail yourself an empty, unsealed envelope tomorrow, and then 15 years from now you could stick whatever you wanted in it and seal it.
Instead of waiting for the government to set a policy to fix things (yeah, that's gonna work) or sitting around whining about the lack of broadband, has anybody considered starting a non-profit coop to provide last mile broadband in their areas? There's been some talk about that here in the Triangle (Chapel Hill, Durham, Raleigh, NC) recently. There are coops providing broadband in some parts of the country already: http://www.cbn.coop/ for example.
This seems like the best solution to me. But we'll probably need to find a way to get the local governments out of the business of creating artificial monopolies through onerous franchising agreements first...
....Maybe 'cause some would think that artificial, arbitrary service caps for no good reason [other than corporate profit] is not what we should have...?
Right, because obviously it's wrong for businesses to earn a profit. Let's just get rid of that evil profit and that will fix everything.
Oh, then there will be the little matter of no investment in infrastructure since there won't be any possibility of getting a return on that investment... but we can just build all the infrastructure with tax dollars. Oh, but wait, with no businesses there will be massive unemployment and so there won't be any tax dollars to build anything with... and there will be the little matter of providing food and clothing, but hey... who cares about that? We gotta make sure the "robber barons" don't take advantage of the working class by earning a profit from their work...
The US government has been violating the Constitution from pretty much the day it was ratified. This is why people need to realize that the Constitution really is "just a piece of paper" in the sense that it can't do anything to defend your rights. Individuals always have the ultimate responsibility for defending themselves, their rights, and their property.
"You have as much Freedom as you are willing to demand, and as you are capable of defending." has never been more true.
So it is OK for IBM to keep their important apps proprietary and still be praised for being "friends" of FOSS?
Sure, unless you're Stallman or a Stallman disciple who think that all proprietary software is evil by nature and should be eradicated from the face of the Earth. And even then, there's no good reason to not praise the contributions IBM have made to the F/L/OSS world, despite whatever objections you may have to their proprietary offerings.
When they open source DB2, Lotus Notes, AIX may be I will take them seriously otherwise they are no different from Microsoft and Oracle.
Except IBM have contributed thousands - if not millions - of lines of code, and hundreds of patents to the F/L/OSS world, unlike Microsoft or Oracle?
Some Usenet groups have degraded into nothing but spam havens, and some have just died from lack of traffic. But there are a few that continue to be valuable sources of info. I personally find value in following comp.ai, comp.ai.genetic, comp.ai.neural-nets, comp.ai.philosophy, comp.lang.lisp, comp.lang.prolog, comp.object and a few others. <shrug/>
I would say that Gen-X has certainly felt one brewing. Fight Club, anyone?
This Gen-X'er certainly feels one brewing. And I *thought* a large chunk of my peers shared some of that... but I'm starting to doubt it. I dunno... as Gen-X'ers reach an age where they start getting elected to public office, etc., we'll see how many of us really believe in ideals like Freedom and Liberty.
I have to say, I'll be *very* disappointed if my "generation" isn't heavily involved in a pro-Liberty, pro-Freedom shift in thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
Reacting is one thing, overreacting is another. Even if you believe the "device" looked like a bomb (which it most certainly didn't if the posted pictures are accurate), it should have been easy enough for them to have her walk through one of the explosives sniffers, or be sniffed by a bomb dog. If she was clean, they could have let her go, apologized for wasting her time, and let her go. But arresting her and charging her with some
bullshit? That's fucking stupid.
People should be smart enough to know not to go wandering around with that kinda stuff like that.
No, people should be free enought to go walking around with "that kinda stuff" without being arrested for it by some fucking
idiot cop with an IQ approximately equal to his shoe size
She caused an incident that could have been avoided by leaving that crap at home.
She didn't cause a damn thing. The "incident" was caused by the incompetent security personnel at the
airport. They have explosives sniffing machines or dogs at the airport, no? If so, it would have taken
5 minutes to check her to make sure she wasn't carrying any explosives, after which she should have been
sent on her way with a hearty apology for wasting her time.
Anyone with half a brain should know that walking around with bombish looking stuff in an airport is gonna cause problems.
Nothing she was carrying looked a damn thing like a bomb to anybody except a total moron.
I hate to break it to you, but the US government has sovereignty over its citizens and that means it can do whatever it wants (up to an including killing them) without a "howdy hay" from anyone.
Only if they allow it. The "howdy hay" can certainly come from the individual, and many individuals will give a "howdy hay" at
attempts by the US government (or any other) to assert their "sovereignty."
Sovereignty exists in the hands of the individual until the individual gives up that right to a government and that's exactly what the people of Colonial America did in 1783. They voluntarily gave up the rights of their individual government to the will of the federal government (or state -- see "clipped sovereignty" for me info.).
They may have given away their own, but they didn't give away mine, or yours, or kdawson's or that of anybody else alive today.
Exactly. Parent post just nailed it, full-stop.
Really? Because, when I watched the video, what I saw was him fighting as hard as he could to get out of their grasp and get back to the mic,
Obviously you watched a different video than I did then. What I saw was him try to jerk away from the cops in the direction of the microphone once, about 10-15 seconds into the video. And you can certainly argue that the cops had no business initiating force on him by physically grabbing him in the first place, which is what really set this all off. There is no reason why police should not be expected to utilize diplomacy and tact in dealing with people who are "in the wrong" in a vague sense, but are not posing a threat to anyone. If they had just gathered around him, and explained nicely "hey, the organizers say you're being disruptive, we'd like to ask you to leave" this whole situation probably could have been avoided. Never mind the fact that Kerry starts trying to answer his question, which implies that at that point in time "the organizers" are actually OK with him and his question.
which is what triggered flooring and cuffing him.
No, by the time he was thrown down on the floor and cuffed they already had him up at the top of the steps and not too far from the exit.
All they had to do was continue moving him outside and it would have been a done deal. There was NEVER any valid reason for the takedown, the cuffing, or the tazer.
And even then, held down by four cops and cuffed, he was still struggling, to the point that he was able to turn his body 90 degrees and lift his torso and head to say "don't tazer me, bro".
Good, once they took him down they had clearly gone overboard and he *should* have resisted, with every ounce of strength in his body. If he'd fucked up one or more of the cops at that point, it would have been justified as self-defense.
Why do you fear mongering liberals continue to twist everything into a 'police state' and gestapo/nazi reference.
They're probably just trying to offset the fear-mongering fascists who have turned this country into
a Nazi / Gestapo style police-state.
He was unnecessarily rude and childish.
So what? Those aren't crimes in and of themselves.
The shocking was used to make him stop moving so they could cuff him.
They had no valid reason to cuff him in the first place. Even if you accept that they had a valid reason
to physically remove him from the venue, they were doing a pretty good job of herding him towards the door
before throwing him to the ground and tasering him. All they had to do was keep doing what they were doing, move
him outside, and then not let him back inside. No arrest was necessary or warranted, and no tasering was necessary.
All of that was his choice. The police did nothing but react to him. Just deal with it.
He was - from what I saw - moving along with the herd of cops, towards the door. Once that was the case, no
further escalation by the cops was necessary unless he had begun to strike at them, or brandish a weapon, etc.
Once they threw him on the ground, they were well into "excessive use of force" and he would have been justified
(and anybody intervening on his behalf would have been equally justified) to defend himself by any means necessary.
One remarkable thing with laws in most of the US is that the one piece of the English common law that didn't survive here is the right to resist an unlawful arrest. Seems kind of perverse when you think about it - you can be arrested for no reason and have to just go with it until they decide to release you.
That is exactly why more people need to understand that "the law" or "the constitution", etc., do not define your rights. Your rights are your
rights, period, end of story, full-stop. If you are guilty of no crime, the police have NO authority to arrest you, detain you, or otherwise
fuck with you unless YOU grant it too them. Now here's the rub: most people are willing to grant the police that (temporary) authority if they
believe they are innocent, because they believe they can get a lawyer, have their day in court, and be acquitted. And 9 times out of 10, that may
be the best approach. But it's still a must to remember that the police have no intrinisic authority whatsoever, and if they violate your rights, you
have every right to resist in any and every way possible.
No, asking the kid to step down from the microphone when he went over his time is fine, and I can't see anybody having a problem with that. But it was what happened afterwards that's the problem. They were doing a fine job of moving him out of the area, and there was no need whatsoever to throw him down on the ground, and even less need to taser him. He was outnumbered as it was, and did not appear to be armed with any sort of weapon.
What happened was a travesty and anybody who sat back and watched that shit happen without lifting a finger to help should be ashamed of themselves.
That said, the guy was resisting arrest,
Good for him. He hadn't done anything criminal, and he *should* resist arrest.
and should have complied with the officers.
Bullshit. A cop is just another punk-ass bitch with a little tin badge, a gun, and a taser. They aren't
special, and if they're infringing your rights, you should resist them with every means available to you.
regardless of whether the police were doing the right thing, the crowd should have tried to save the guy.. this is frighteningly close to people being too afraid to do anything when their neighbors are dragged away by the gestapo, and the threat is clear in the video "stay in your seats or you'll be tasered and arrested too."
Well said, friend.
What has happened to the back-bone of the American people? Look, if that shit, or the similar incident at UCLA, had gone down in the 1960's, you can get some cops would have gotten beat the fuck down.
Now, people just sit in their chairs, mind their business, and maybe - if they're really radical - film the incident so they can put it up on youtube. But where are the people willing to come to the aid of these people who are being abused by cops? Where the the American people with the balls / back-bone to physically intervene when someone is being punished for no reason?
How can people just sit back and watch this shit happen? When did our nation become nothing but passive sheep who blindly follow instructions and obey "the man" just because he's "the man?" This is pathetic, just pathetic.
When various of your joints are locked to the verge of damage, you are going to cooperate. Haven't you ever watched UFC?
There almost certainly is not a single high-level (or maybe even low-level) UFC level fighter whose base style is aikido. Aikido *might* be an effective style *if* they trained full-speed against resisting opponents like brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioners or wrestlers, but as it's commonly taught and trained, aikido is almost useless. Some of the "come along" holds are used by cops and bouncers to move drunks around, but that's about it.
The guy is a journalism student. He knew that his actions were going to get publicity. He knew what was going to happen if he acted out. Really, what was his motive???
What does that matter? It was excessive force, regardless of what his motive was.
Because the GPL requires it. See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnchangedJustBinary and read the
next 4 or 5 entries.
Providing a legitimate link to source is just as good. Otherwise, they could be in for chewing up valuable bandwidth and transfer charges.
It's not "just as good" to provide a link to a site you don't control or have some sort of agreement in place with. From the GPL FAQ:
The GPL says you must offer access to copy the source code "from the same place"; that is, next to the binaries. However, if you make arrangements with another site to keep the necessary source code available, and put a link or cross-reference to the source code next to the binaries, we think that qualifies as "from the same place".
Note, however, that it is not enough to find some site that happens to have the appropriate source code today, and tell people to look there. Tomorrow that site may have deleted that source code, or simply replaced it with a newer version of the same program. Then you would no longer be complying with the GPL requirements. To make a reasonable effort to comply, you need to make a positive arrangement with the other site, and thus ensure that the source will be available there for as long as you keep the binaries available.
Yeah, think about this: how can you prove the envelope was sealed, and contained it's present contents, when you mailed it? If this worked, you could just mail yourself an empty, unsealed envelope tomorrow, and then 15 years from now you could stick whatever you wanted in it and seal it.
Never a truer word have I heard spoken. Well said, friend!
Instead of waiting for the government to set a policy to fix things (yeah, that's gonna work) or sitting around whining about
the lack of broadband, has anybody considered starting a non-profit coop to provide last mile broadband in their areas? There's been
some talk about that here in the Triangle (Chapel Hill, Durham, Raleigh, NC) recently. There are coops providing broadband
in some parts of the country already: http://www.cbn.coop/ for example.
This seems like the best solution to me. But we'll probably need to find a way to get the local governments out of the business of
creating artificial monopolies through onerous franchising agreements first...
Right, because obviously it's wrong for businesses to earn a profit. Let's just get rid of that evil profit and
that will fix everything.
Oh, then there will be the little matter of no investment in infrastructure since there won't be any possibility of getting
a return on that investment... but we can just build all the infrastructure with tax dollars. Oh, but wait, with no businesses
there will be massive unemployment and so there won't be any tax dollars to build anything with... and there will be the little matter
of providing food and clothing, but hey... who cares about that? We gotta make sure the "robber barons" don't take advantage
of the working class by earning a profit from their work...
... know about good music?!??
The US government has been violating the Constitution from pretty much the day it was ratified. This is why people need to realize that the Constitution really is "just a piece of paper" in the sense that it can't do anything to defend your rights. Individuals always have the ultimate responsibility for defending themselves, their rights, and their property.
"You have as much Freedom as you are willing to demand, and as you are capable of defending." has never been more true.
So it is OK for IBM to keep their important apps proprietary and still be praised for being "friends" of FOSS?
Sure, unless you're Stallman or a Stallman disciple who think that all proprietary software is evil by nature and should be
eradicated from the face of the Earth. And even then, there's no good reason to not praise the contributions IBM have made to the F/L/OSS world, despite whatever objections you may have to their proprietary offerings.
When they open source DB2, Lotus Notes, AIX may be I will take them seriously otherwise they are no different from Microsoft and Oracle.
Except IBM have contributed thousands - if not millions - of lines of code, and hundreds of patents to the F/L/OSS world, unlike Microsoft or Oracle?
Some Usenet groups have degraded into nothing but spam havens, and some have just died from lack of traffic. But there are a few that />
continue to be valuable sources of info. I personally find value in following comp.ai, comp.ai.genetic, comp.ai.neural-nets, comp.ai.philosophy, comp.lang.lisp, comp.lang.prolog, comp.object and a few others. <shrug
I have no comment.
I would say that Gen-X has certainly felt one brewing. Fight Club, anyone?
This Gen-X'er certainly feels one brewing. And I *thought* a large chunk of my peers shared some of that... but I'm starting to doubt it. I dunno... as Gen-X'ers reach an age where they start getting elected to public office, etc., we'll see how many of us really believe in ideals like Freedom and Liberty.
I have to say, I'll be *very* disappointed if my "generation" isn't heavily involved in a pro-Liberty, pro-Freedom shift in thinking.